DNA Study Busts Myth that One Million Appalachians are of Turkish Descent

DNA Study

DNA Study Busts Myth that One Million Appalachians are of Turkish Descent

By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier

For decades, Turkish pseudo-historians and propagandists have made bizarre claims about Turks being the ancestors of various ethnic groups around the world, including Native Americans, African-Americans, and the strangest of all -- Melungeons -- a little-known group of dark-skinned residents of Appalachia.

To counter Armenian political activities in Washington, the Turkish government regularly reaches out to anyone who could be co-opted with all-expense paid trips, special gifts, and other financial inducements, including funding studies and conferences on the alleged Turkish origin of Melungeons. Even though these one million Appalachians do not carry much political clout in Congress, Ankara is interested in claiming them to be of Turkish descent, hoping to strengthen its political and economic clout in the United States.

The Turkish initiative faced one ‘minor’ problem: there was no evidence that Melungeons were descendants of Turks. This issue was easily resolved when the Turkish government provided a “research grant” to a Melungeon named N. Brent Kennedy. In April 1995, he flew to Istanbul and wrote a book alleging that hundreds of captured Ottoman sailors were dumped on the shores of North Carolina by Sir Francis Drake in the 16th century!

Kennedy compiled a long list of “amazing” similarities between Turks and Melungeons, such as eating beef and mashed potatoes, the habit of hugging each other, Appalachian quilts having Ottoman designs, Anatolian folk dancers performing square dance, and Turkish music sounding like bluegrass! He discovered that the Turkish word “neyaygara” sounds like Niagara, “dilhah yer” is pronounced Delaware, “tenasuh” means Tennessee, “kan tok” is Kentucky, and “allah bamya” is Alabama!

Kennedy further stated that Turkish scholars have “long believed that a connection existed between themselves and eastern seaboard American Indians, based on both physical appearance and shared words and customs.” He gathered these “important facts” from Turkish “historians” during his meetings at Marmara University in Istanbul. “Several hundred Ottoman sailors could exert a powerful genetic, cultural, and linguistic influence on the sixteenth-century Native American Tribes into which they married,” Kennedy confidently concluded.

Appalachians, however, were infuriated by the distortion of Melungeons’ ethnic origin and exploitation of their history. Historian and award-winning journalist Tim Hashaw of Houston, Texas, sent a letter asking me to “investigate the tawdry connection between the ATAA (Assembly of Turkish American Associations) and the Melungeon Heritage Association.” Hashaw asserted that “Melungeons are an obscure tri-racial (white, black, and American Indian) community in Appalachia -- Virginia and Tennessee. We are not now, nor have we ever been, Turkish. Yet, Melungeons are being wrongly exploited by Turkish associations to deny the Armenian Genocide and to support questionable Turkish agendas in Washington DC.”
Cont. here:

http://jackgoins.blogspot.com/2015/09/dna-study.html


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Turkey Spends Millions to Cover Up Armenian Genocide

State of Denial

By David Holthouse
Intelligence Report
Summer 2008


The Armenian Genocide in History Read More
The Sites: A list of genocide denial websites. Read More
Information for Teachers Read More

Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require all public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just after World War I.

The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully plotted genocide.

Turkish president Abdullah Gul warns of severe repercussions to the relations between the United States and Turkey if the "Armenian allegations are accepted."

Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide — a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions.
Lewy makes similar revisionist claims in his 2005 book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide and in frequent lectures at university campuses across the country. Speaking at Harvard University in March 2007, he chalked up the ghastly Armenian death toll to "bungling misrule," and stressed that "it is important to bear in mind the enormous difference between ineptness, even ineptness that had tragic consequences" and deliberate mass murder.

"Armenians call the calamitous events of 1915-1916 in the Ottoman Empire the first genocide of the twentieth century," he said. "Most Turks refer to this episode as war time relocation made necessary by the treasonous conduct of the Armenian minority. The debate on what actually happened has been going on for almost 100 years and shows no signs of resolution."

But it's not only Armenians calling the slaughter a genocide, and there is no real debate about its essential details, according to the vast majority of credible historians. Although Lewy's brand of genocide denial is subtler than that of Holocaust deniers who declare there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, it's no less an attempt to rewrite history.

"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide — hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades — is consistent," the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government.

"The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens — an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years."

Full Article Here:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?

Foreign Lobby Interests Using Private Citizens for their own Agenda

July 20, 2007

Advocacy groups have asked Americans to tell their congressmen plenty of things. "I’m opposed to recognizing the Armenian Genocide" may be one of the strangest.

In a video posted on the Capitol Broadcasting Service Earlier this week, Former Rep. Bob Livingston (R, Louisiana) makes an 8-minute plea for Americans to urge their legislators not to make a colossal mistake: endorsing the bill that would officially acknowledge that Armenians were slaughtered by the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

The issue has been controversial in Washington for years. While the "supposed-genocide" is routinely denied by Turkish government officials – whom Livingston has represented for more than seven years – most credible historians have gone out on a limb and described the genocide as fact. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"In what would later be known as the first genocide of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were driven from their homes, massacred, or marched until they died."
Not all of Livingston's address is devoted to casting doubt on the genocide’s occurrence -- he also argues that the symbolic resolution could have tangible consequences. Given that Turkey is an ally in a very unsteady part of the world -- and that the nation currently has troops massed on the border of Iraqi Kurdistan -- Livingston's case against unnecessarily angering them highlights valid strategic concerns.

But some of the statements the former congressman makes veer into ideological territory.
"Nobody really knows, in this day and age, unless you're a historian, what really happened 90 to a hundred years ago," Livingston, whose family roots in America date back to the 17th century, declares.

And while he attributes the argument to “The Turks and many historians,” Livingston comes awfully close to suggesting that any possible killing of Armenians would have been committed in self defense: "It was simply a lot of Turkish people getting fed up with their people getting killed and massacred," he states.There’s also a linguistic case to be made against the genocide, Livingston observes: It couldn’t have happened, he said, because the word “genocide” didn’t exist yet. The term, he correctly notes, "was coined in 1947, long after the instance of 1915 and so forth."

A rose by any other name, indeed.The video has already prompted a response by The Armenian National Committee of America, which can be seen here.

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